'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Sreemoy Talukdar - BJP's Dalit outreach is like the great Indian laughter challenge

The BJP is in a right
royal fix over Dalits. The portends are deeply worrying for the party in an
election season. BJP's caste-agnostic approach under Narendra Modi and Amit
Shah seeks to consolidate Hindu votes under the saffron banner but the
political manoeuvre has struggled to surmount the insurmountable social fault
lines. The attempted grand
coalition of Hindu votes isn't working (refer to bypoll losses in Uttar
Pradesh, especially Phulpur), it is being accused of letting the SC/ST Act be
"diluted" under its watch, its Dalit outreach program is in a
shambles and the party is facing stinging criticism even from leaders within
its own fold.

Under pressure from
the top leadership, BJP ministers and MPs are rushing to spend nights with
Dalits, share their food and grievances but instead of "restoring
faith", a series of sorry gaffes has reduced the effort to a farce,
prompting even the RSS to sound a warning. It is a huge crisis
for a party that is desperate to transcend its "upper-caste" image
and expand appeal among Dalits and OBCs. BJP wouldn't have forgotten the
lessons of 1993 when its Hindutva project was derailed due to a subaltern
consolidation against it.

As Rajan Pandey writes
in The Wire, the SP-BSP alliance in 1993 "marked the
coming together of Dalits and OBCs (along with Muslims) or the ‘Bahujans’ on
one electoral front. The alliance succeeded in halting the BJP from achieving a
majority mark even at the peak of the mandir agitation after the Babri mosque
demolition in 1993 and also succeeded in forming the government – with the SP
winning 109 seats and BSP 67. The Modi government
has sought to address the crisis of faith by taking on the Supreme Court. It
believes that by opposing the apex court's landmark ruling (which has been
perceived in political circles as a "dilution" of the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989) and filing
review petitions and maybe even bringing an ordinance to overturn the verdict,
it would be able to convey a message that the party is serious about Dalit
welfare. Except that it is not so simple.

Instead of reinforcing
a 'Dalit-friendly' image, BJP's obduracy on the SC/ST Act reveals its lack of
options and a desperation. The Supreme Court, in preventing mandatory arrests
on complaints filed under the stringent legislature, has taken an enlightened
stand through its 20 March order. Refusing to buckle under BJP's pressure, the
apex court has moved to prevent an innocent from being harassed and thereby
uphold the principles of natural justice. While answering
Attorney General KK Venugopal's charge that the Supreme Court judgment
interferes with the Constitutional separation of powers and intrudes into the
legislative sphere to dilute a law that acted as a safeguard against atrocities
on Dalits, an apex court bench of Justices AK Goel and UU Lalit on Thursday
said the judgement intended to "protect the innocent from harassment
through a frivolous complaint. Can the Supreme Court not protect the liberty
and right to life of an innocent by safeguarding his/her arrest by laying down
guidelines?"

The bench also said, "What does the legislature seek to achieve?
Does it want to instill the fear of arrest or something else? Arrest should not
be so easy. That is why we put a filter of preliminary enquiry, that let there
be some application of mind before arresting a person under the SC/ST
Act."

The apex court refused
to impose a stay on its original order, turned down the attorney general's
prayer for a larger bench and fixed 16 May as the date of the next hearing. To
understand why the BJP is trying to repeatedly challenge a morally, ethically
and legally sound piece of judgment, we need only consider a particular
exchange between the bench and AG Venugopal on Thursday.

As the attorney
general cited recent incidents of atrocities against Dalits to argue that
stringent provisions are needed to protect a historically oppressed community,
the bench pointed out: "For that you need to deliver immediate punishment…
Why can’t you punish in a month or so?" Justice Goel asked, according to a
report in The Indian Express. "Venugopal replied that
this was difficult given the size of the country’s population. 'There lies the
problem,' Justice Goel said, adding 'perhaps social action is also required at
the level of society (to stop caste discrimination). People have to learn to
respect each other'," said the report.

This exchange goes to
the nub of the debate and exemplifies the BJP's difficulties. The party's
position on the SC/ST Act, where it appears as entirely unreasonable, arises
from a political compulsion. Even if it manages to bring an ordinance to overturn the verdict that will
amount to a political quick fix to remedy a deeply internalised social problem.
And as the BJP is finding out to its peril, such an approach is doomed to fail. Modi and Shah may
encourage and even put pressure on BJP ministers to reach out to the
Dalits but the strategy, in absence of a bona fide devolution of power, is
likely to become counterproductive. Ingrained social divisions manifest in
myriad ways. At times, these may surface despite the best of intentions. A few
examples are worth looking at.

BJP minister from
Uttar Pradesh Suresh Rana responded to the prime minister's Gram Swaraj Abhiyan
by sharing food with Rajnish Kumar, a Dalit resident of Lohgarh in Aligarh
district, but the elaborate meal was apparently ordered from outside. "We
were not informed about the minister's visit to my house. He came along with
other BJP leaders and took meal ordered from outside. The food was prepared at
a nearby government medical centre," said Kumar. Anupama Jaiswal,
minister for education in Uttar Pradesh's Yogi Adityanath government, has
waxed lyrical on how BJP ministers are "braving mosquito bites" to
implement Dalit outreach programs. "So that the
benefits are received, ministers are going to these people's houses and are being
bitten by mosquitoes all night. Most importantly, they feel good by the
experience. If someone has been assigned two places, he says no, I want to go
to four. Thus, when there is satisfaction in work, it empowers us. Even I am
doing more houses than allotted to me," said a beaming Jaiswal, completely oblivious of the irony.

Last month, Union law
minister Ravi Shankar Prasad courted controversy by allegedly having lunch at a five-star hotel in Patna with people
from the Dalit community. The pictures were widely shared on social media. Another minister from
Uttar Pradesh, Rajendra Pratap Singh, has compared BJP leaders to "Lord Ram" for
uplifting Dalits by eating with them, leading BJP MP Udit Raj to stress that
such "outreaches" appear as insults to the community. "The new
Dalit of today feels that this shows them down. I am not speaking as a BJP
spokesperson but as a Dalit. I don't support it. That a savarna goes
to Dalit home to speak - it shows they are lower, and other is higher," he
said.

These repeated
missteps arise not out of contempt for Dalits (by all accounts, the ministers
mean well) but are a manifestation of deep social divisions that cannot be
cured by inter-dining alone. It requires simultaneous addressing of several
issues such as devolution of power, financial and social inclusion, education,
employment and removal of social taboos to uplift the community and enhance
social bonding. As Abhinav Prakash,
Delhi University professor, writes in Swarajya, "by creating a united vote bloc
incorporating all Hindu castes, BJP has also internalised all the
contradictions and clash of interests within its ambit. It was always going to
be challenging to run this political coalition without any corresponding effort
to create a social coalition, which would necessitate backing anti-caste
socio-religious reforms."

The RSS has rightly flagged it as a grave danger for BJP.
Patriarch Mohan Bhagwat has advised BJP leaders not to restrict their outreach
to community lunches alone. “Merely visiting their houses is not going to be
enough. It has to be a two-way process. We have to welcome members of dalit
community into our houses, the way they welcome us," he was quoted as
saying during an internal meeting of the RSS. Commensality is a
practice laden with symbolism. Eating together is a useful tool for social
inclusion but tokenism beats the purpose. Ambedkar scholar Valerian Rodrigues
was quoted, as saying in The Indian Express, "While an upper caste leader
eating in Dalit homes might symbolically express that he is prepared to be
included in their community bond, the instrumental use of such gestures is very
obvious to everyone, including to Dalits."

BJP seeks to become a
tent for a rainbow Hindu coalition but it is not investing enough in ensuring
that actual power transfer takes place at the ground level so that the oppressed
class doesn't feel shortchanged. Short of that effort, anything else will be
perceived as optical illusion.